An exploration of the changes in the Soviet Union. Includes footage of the failed coup against Gorbachev. While making this film the director, Yuris Podnieks, was arrested, beaten and had his camera confisticated. In 1987, Juris Podnieks and his team began a series of films describing the inevitable changes in the Soviet Union during the Perestroika era. Podnieks went to the radioactive forbidden zone in Chernobyl, to the blood-stained streets of Uzbekistan, to the ruins in Armenia after the earthquake. The film looks back upon the five years of the Perestroika and ends with the astonishing events of the five day coup in August 1991: the end of the empire.